Fleas, Roaches, and Dirty Underwear, Oh My!

I am clearly behind on my blogging, so I think I am going to go backwards and start with the most recent events. We just went on our first family vacation, and our first any kind of vacation in 6 years! We decided to go to Florida to see my grandma who turned 90 years old this year. My parents, Jenna and Ryan, and all our kids rented a really large house that looked fabulous on the internet. It was originally owned by the Ringling family--you know, the circus Ringling's. You can kind of see from the picture it was quite spacious.

That's the ballroom with the sitting room attached, behind it are two huge master bedrooms. It really was enormous!

There were 5 bedrooms--four had bathrooms attached. It seemed like a dream vacation home. However, it was not the ideal vacation getaway I had hoped for. The fifth bedroom was unusable because the air conditioning didn't reach it. The air conditioner for the kitchen and dining room didn't work--it was replaced four days into our vacation. Because of losing a bedroom, we ended up with all three kids in our room. The room was spacious enough, but it made it difficult once the kids went to bed for us to get anything out of the room. We were wandering the house with our toiletries to get a shower in either my parents room or Jenna and Ryan's room.

Almost once a day we found a dead cockroach in the house. I know that Florida has lots of bugs, and big bugs, so I could mostly deal with the occasional dead roach. Thankfully, Jenna was the only one to see one alive. I think I would have lost it if I had seen that. To add insult to it all, we had paid a cleaning fee with the rental cost, and yet we found a pair of dirty underwear in the hot room (I'm assuming it was dirty, we didn't inspect it closely since noone was staying in that room). Jenna and my mom also found a human molar on the table outside. ummm...gross.

Now, I could deal with all of the above and chalk it up to you get what you pay for (the house wasn't terribly expensive). I would even consider going back. However, by day two I had several itchy bites on my ankles. They progressively got worse. We were thinking they were no see 'ums which are tiny bugs that can bite and some people have a reaction to them. A few days into the vacation, I decided to check the sheets because I was starting to suspect fleas. Sure enough, I found a flea in our bed. Then I found two in Jenna's bed. Worse, I found two on Juliana's face at random times and Bill found two on Brendan's face. By the end of the trip, I had over 75 bites on my ankles, feet, legs, back, and arms. And they itched like the dickens. Near the end of the vacation I started spraying myself with bug spray after showers and swimming to fend off the fleas. Needless to say, I was ready to burn the house down by the time we left. Note to self: Next time you go on a Florida vacation, ask when the last time the house was exterminated!

Note the bites but pay no attention to the ugly foot, I had gotten a pedicure, but what can I say, that's my foot...

The rest of the vacation was mostly wonderful and I will post about that next.